The biggest miscarriage of justice in modern U.K. history happened at…the post office?
Lesson summary
Hi there everyone, it’s Jeff and this is Plain English, where we help you upgrade your English with stories about current events and trending topics. And this is a big trending topic in the U.K. right now.
A “miscarriage of justice” is when something goes wrong with the justice system—when there’s some outcome that’s not right, not just, with the courts or police. And a scandal at the Post Office is being called one of the biggest miscarriages of justice in modern British history. Thousands of post office workers were accused of stealing money—many went to jail, some went bankrupt paying the money back. But the whole thing was the result of a computer problem.
That’s today’s story. In the second half of the audio lesson, I’ll show you how to use the expression “drop off.” This is lesson 651, so that means JR has uploaded the full content to PlainEnglish.com/651. That includes the free transcripts. PlainEnglish.com/651.
Computer glitch leads to scandal at the U.K. Post Office
In the U.K., the Post Office is exactly what it says in the name: the post office. It’s not the service that delivers the mail; that’s called the Royal Mail. The Post Office is a network of small shops around the country—11,500 of them. You can find them in London neighborhoods. You can find them in very small towns.
You can do a lot of things at the Post Office. You can buy stamps. You can drop off mail and packages to be delivered to other parts of the U.K. and the world. You can put your mail on hold while you travel. Post Offices also offer some limited financial services—you can cash checks, collect a pension payment, and pay utility bills.
The Post Office is owned by the government. However, individual shops are owned by franchisees called subpostmasters. It’s like McDonald’s or Marriott hotels: the brand is one company, but the individual locations are owned by many individual business owners.
In 1999, the Post Office—the national organization—decided to implement a new computer system in all its shops. The system was called “Horizon.” The subpostmasters, the owners of individual shops, were required to use the system. The system was made by Fujitsu, a Japanese technology company. The system would, for the first time, computerize the Post Office accounting and inventory systems.
But many subpostmasters got an unpleasant surprise with the new system. The new computer system said that money was missing from their Post Offices.
Remember that each branch is owned by an individual. And any time there’s a shortfall—any time money is missing—any time the individual branch collected less than it should have for its business activities—whenever that happened the subpostmaster was responsible. The subpostmasters had to pay the shortfall out of their own pockets .
It wasn’t just a few isolated incidents. This happened over and over , across hundreds of Post Offices around the U.K. Although this happened to a lot of people, the subpostmasters didn’t talk to each other. The union that represents them didn’t connect the dots . So every person accused thought they were the only ones experiencing the problem. They felt guilty; they felt like they had done something wrong; they felt incompetent. And they were scared.
The law says they personally had to pay back any shortfall. But that’s not all. A “shortfall” means that money was missing—and the subpostmasters were accused of stealing it. They had to pay the money back, and then possibly answer for the crime of stealing it or covering it up.
Many subpostmasters lost their life savings paying back the shortfalls from their offices. Others went deep into personal debt. Marriages were ruined over it. Four accused subpostmasters committed suicide. Many pleaded guilty to false accounting because it seemed like the easiest way out.
Over about fifteen years, 900 subpostmasters were accused of stealing money from their branches. Many hundreds, maybe thousands more, quietly paid shortfalls out of their pockets. Seven hundred were convicted and over four hundred went to jail.
But the subpostmasters weren’t at fault. The computer system from Fujitsu got the numbers all wrong.
The Post Office first became aware of problems in Horizon in 2010, but they continued to report subpostmasters for theft until 2015. A handful of accused subpostmasters fought back , and finally the U.K.’s High Court ruled in 2019 that Horizon, the computer program, had defects—that the reported shortfalls were the result of a mistake in the software, not wrongdoing by subpostmasters. But that ruling came almost twenty years after the system was implemented. Twenty years this was going on!
Although the scandal was reported in the media over the years, it didn’t capture the attention of the British public—and politicians—until now. A recent documentary on the British channel ITV dramatized the scandal. The show is called “Mr. Bates versus the Post Office,” and it tells the story of Alan Bates, the subpostmaster who led the campaign at the High Court.
It’s ITV’s most popular show in three years. The Post Office admitted it was at fault years ago, but neither it nor the British government adequately compensated the subpostmasters who were falsely accused. The government didn’t go back and erase the prosecutions from the past or provide compensation for people who paid “shortfalls” out of their own pockets.
Now, though, with the bright lights of the TV special on the issue, things are starting to change. An investigative commission called this a “miscarriage of justice” and the “biggest single series of wrongful convictions in British legal history.”
Rishi Sunak, the prime minister, pledged that the government would “swiftly exonerate and compensate” those who were wrongly accused. The government has set up three different funds to pay back the hundreds of victims.
Jeff’s take
What I don’t understand—there’s so much I don’t understand—how did this take so long? Either thousands of people were stealing from the Post Office—or there was a bug in the system? I mean, which is more likely?
I’m not naïve enough to think that the justice system in any country always gets things right. But I would like to believe that courts in the U.K. and other Western countries don’t ever get things so wrong.
But here’s the worst part. Fujitsu still provides the accounting system for the Post Office. The company says the problems have been fixed.
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